The Way of the Wild (Hawkes)/The Long Winter Sleep
The long winter sleep is one of the tender and beautiful phases of nature, although it seems so cold and cruel. Really Mother Nature takes the very best care of all her children during this time of rest and recuperation.
Every twenty-four hours man retires to his bed for sleep in order that he may regain his strength and repair the waste of the day, so nature tucks her plants and flowers to sleep once a year in certain climates in order that they may rest and get ready for new life and growth.
First the North Wind, who is the evil spirit of winter, strips the dead leaves from all the trees. Then they are like ships that have furled their sails, so that they may withstand the great blows of winter and not be broken or blown down. Thus the North Wind helps them where he seeks to harm. He also scatters the seeds of plants and trees in every direction. Such seeds as those of the maple which have wings can fly a long way. In this manner the forest spreads and little new trees spring up miles from the parent tree. The birds also have been carrying seeds all through the summer and autumn, so that the earth has been well stocked with new seed in readiness for the coming of spring.
In many of the hollows the dead leaves are piled high, covering with warm leaf blankets the arbutus, the hepatica, the anemone, and many other wild flowers. Some trees there are which do not shed their garments at all, or they do it so gradually that we do not notice it.
These are the non-deciduous trees, such as the hemlock, the pine, the spruce, and all the other evergreens.
Every second year they shed their cones which contain the seeds, and thus keep up the forest.
At last when everything is in readiness, when the dead leaves have covered the wild flowers, and the trees and bushes are ready, there comes the new snow. It is as soft and white as wool, and as clean as Mother Nature can make it. Then all the dead weeds and grasses along the roadside take on new beauty. The pines and the evergreens are festooned with great white plumes, and even the elm twig, as Lowell says, is ridged with pearl.
What a pleasure it is then to take a long tramp in the deep woods and behold this beauty and loveliness. We will find an army of chickadees at work in the woods. They are all busy hunting and eating the aphis, or bark louse, and they do a great deal of good.
The trees look quite different from what they did in the summer when we threaded the forest, but the promise of life is still there.
They are even growing in the winter-time, although we do not think so. Under the old bark the new bark is forming and all the wonderful processes of nature are going on just as though it was summer-time, only more slowly. Even before the dead leaves fell the new leaf buds were forming at the base of the old leaf stem. This was largely what made tHe leaf fall.
The old was pushed one side by the new, just as nature is always doing.
The partridge could tell you all about it, for he has been budding ever since the middle of last November. You will often find him stripping off the new buds in the alder bushes, and in the apple orchards, even before the first snow comes.
I love to think that all the time they are sleeping under the snow, warm in their white blankets, that the flowers and shrubs are dreaming of springtime and the touch of the first warm sunbeams of April.
The skunk cabbage, which most people despise, is one of the first wild flowers to awaken. It is this homely plant that hears the first call of spring, while the snow is still deep on the ground. It is a very common thing to find the skunk cabbage in bloom within ten feet of a snow-bank. It has a creamy white blossom, wrapped in its green folds, and this first spring flower is a favorite with many botanists.
The arbutus, which has been safely hidden in the dead grass, is also a light sleeper and wakes early. That flower, too, I have gathered, on a sunny slope of the pasture land, almost within arm's length of a snow-bank.
Along the brookside the pussywillows are swelling while the winter is still with us. Some times the January thaw will bring them forth. Dear little cats of the brookside. How often have your furry faces cheered me in winter.
The sugar maple is the first of the large trees really to feel the touch of spring. Then its sap will go leaping up into its branches each day as the sun mounts, and scurrying back into the roots at night.
This is the season of maple-sugar-making, which was known to the American Indians long before the coming of the white man. But there is a wise little woodpecker, called the Yellow Bellied Sap Sucker, who learned the secret of the maple even before the Indians. Perhaps the Indian saw him at work and tasted the sap, and so discovered the secret.
When the sap first begins to mount in the sugar maple this bird will select a tree with a sunny south exposure and go up and down the south side, pecking little well-s in the bark with his sharp beak. These well-s are always deep enough to reach the white wood, and the sweet sap.
By the time he has made a score of well-s the first one will be full of sap.
So up and down the tree he goes all day long drinking the sweet sap until he can hold no more.
Some cabinet-makers claim that it is these sap well-s drilled in the sugar maple that make the beautiful wood called bird's eye maple.
But I am not sure as to that.
Most of the wild flowers, however, are not so hardy or so courageous as the skunk cabbage and the arbutus, and they prefer to await the call of Pan and the coming of the South Wind. Just as the North Wind announces the coming of winter, so the South Wind announces the coming of spring. Chinook he is called in the west, where he comes with great suddenness, causing the landscape to change in a single day. But here in our New England he comes more gradually. Often the South and the North Winds fight for possession of the land for several days. But soon the old blusterer is driven back, and the South Wind has things all his own way.
Then he comes dancing over hill and dale, calling low sweet strains to all the wild flowers, trees and shrubs. Up from their leaf mold beds the flowers come dancing, fragrant, and new as a new day, sweet and smiling as only spring can make them, miracles of beauty and loveliness. Then the birds sing, the brooks babble, the sunbeams dance, and all the world is glad.
Glad for the new life, glad for the new joy and the new hope. "We knew the South Wind would not forget," they all seem to be saying. "We knew Mother Nature would keep us safe and sound until another spring."
She certainly did keep them well, just as she keeps all her promises both to flowers and to men. So well she kept them that this latest spring is always the most beautiful and wonderful spring that ever was, because it is God's latest miracle.
The end